The Primose Path of Dalliances
by Lorindel
Summary: A somewhat troubled Ariadne Oliver plunges into the deep waters of her life. And I can assure you that her chief concern is not this sweet, whodunits-inducing, favorite fruit of hers.


_Warning: the characters of Agatha Christie don't belong to me. I play with them, yes, but I will make my best efforts to give them back unspoiled._

There was a time when Ariadne Oliver bent her head when she looked at Poirot's perceptive eyes. Her jaw used to drop towards her lap, her smile gained an ungainly shadow of coyness, and her hands uneasily clench the cloth of her goony haute couture gown. She was beaten hollow by the brilliant forensics of the detective and the absurdness of her feminine intuition ("female", as she put it, when this supra-sense failed her – in numerous times, of course. Sven, her Finnish, insufferable, type A-personality hero bested her when it came to the iffy, muddy, and headache-, apples-binging-inducing area of criminal inquiries).

The reasoning was not her strongest suit. She felt more than she thought, but from time to time, the superficial, emotional approach of what she regarded as a mere amateur pastime was deemed right. The most satisfying events in her career were not a literary prize, neither the epiphanic resolution of a plot twist, but Hercule Poirot's rapid glance of satisfaction when her sporadic acumens had foreshadowed the outcome of a successful inquiry. Most of the times, the haphazard has its hand in the business, and a bit of, if highly theoretical, literary experience. But Sven taught her never to confess one's ignorance, and emphatically boast one's genius (well, her Belgian friend was a powerful source of inspiration as well).

Wisely, Poirot has told her once that human beings have the chance of being capable of forgetting, contrary with the elephants she was so fond of. It was the end of a dyspeptic day, and they were both looking the sunset, beyond the balustrade of the Ravenscroft's house. Had she been less weary, and saddened by the resurrected past, she would have answered that oblivion was a curse that humanity was afflicted with. Indeed, Poirot was lucky not to belong to the category of simple, short-sighted mortals, who rejoiced in their memorial incompetence. Naturally, she would have gladly forgotten the events of the past hours, but they pertained to a bigger picture in which the nonplussed detective was included. Or even more, that he painted, Ariadne suspected. There was the touch of the demiurge in him, a sense of power that revealed itself in the cathartic moments of the resolution, when he excitedly strutted and jibber-jabbered to his audience's flabbergasted faces his jaw-dropping deductive gifts. Ariadne revered that blatant immodesty and even more the disturbing but at the same time comforting impression of being a secondary character in the hands of a fanciful, yet trusting author. Anything could have happened, but had not, and now the world was safe because Hercule Poirot's mind has officiated and rebalanced the right and the wrong, again, till the Ragnarok, the Viking's Apocalypse, occurred, or prosaically, till she pulled the plug of Sven's life (even though her character was a cross to bear, she could not picture her without his whims, his vegan meals, and his old-fashioned, crooked humor. With him she would die, but preferably not in his arms).

Poirot was her equilibrium, her inspirer, her proof reader; the insatiable, never satisfied critic, the editor who sent back her manuscripts till there was none of these horrible typos that the barbaric language of her Nordic sleuth propelled her to make. She admitted she was a hack of the worst sort, stalking great detectives in order to copy down their feats, but that was her nature: she looked up these quirky, marvelous creatures; she needed their inklings that allowed her to make a living. How her pulp fictions were dependent of Poirot's multiple cases! Had she not encountered him over a beheaded corpse at a serial murder party that coincided with Christmas night, she would not have written half of her work.

Moreover, she comprehended that there was a sense of the sublime in the supernatural quickness of their deductions. In scribbling them on her sheet, she too acquired the thaumaturgic gift of creating a world where everything was clear as crystal and motivated by reason.

That was why, when her friend invited her for a "light Belgian super (gastronomic, Madame, which cannot be said of your English bangers and mash!)", she decided to take her literary contract with her. At last, Poirot would benefit of the sumptuous royalties of Bloomsbury. And his name would figure as the dedicator in the epigraph of her newfangled books – and she would ensure that her editor would be briefed on the topic.


End file.
